One aspect of the interpersonal communications competency is to be able to effectively prepare and deliver educational materials to individuals and groups. My competency level has progressed from novice to satisfactory during my medical school career. I will describe a few experiences that characterize my journey in this competency. Early on in medical school during part one, we gave presentations on patients as well as the science and social topics related to them. I was given feedback throughout these presentations that helped me improve on these skills. This was continued in part 2 during presentations on specific topics to my team during service. I may have initially thought it important to just always present facts, but with repetition learned it also important to consider the purpose of the presentation and the intended audience.
My skills in this competency continued to develop during part 3 with the AHSS project I was working on. My team and I aimed to lower the average hemoglobin a1c at the upper Arlington family medicine practice. Our analysis identified that patients had little to no access to appropriate materials on diabetes management. We developed an educational pamphlet that provided patients with knowledge. We saw the percentage of patients with A1c greater than 9% improve from 42 to 22 percent with the implementation of the flyer distribution.
I hope to continue to be able to develop, prepare and present educational materials in my career. I think it is extremely important for us physicians to be able to help our patients understand the complex diseases that they live with. I think I have improved in this competency because I have learned how to distill medical information into actionable items for my patients. My goal is to be able to continue to identify areas where educational materials where are needed and deliver them in a way to maximize impact. I think success is defined much in the same way success was defined in the AHSS project. Seeing an actual improvement in the lives of our patients. I will work with a faculty member during residency to identify an area where educational materials could be beneficial for patients. I believe there will be adequate opportunities available. I think it is realistic to envision implementing a similar intervention by the end of residency.